Gianine Denise Rosenblum doesn’t see herself as a poet. As a clinical psychologist, she is a “science writer,” she said. But when she and Stuart Miller got together in 2022, after decades of friendship, she found herself writing poems. “They would burst out of her,” Mr. Miller, 59, said.

The two first met on the phone on Oct. 1, 1983, when they were 17 and in their senior year of high school in Brooklyn. She attended Edward R. Murrow, and he was at Midwood.

Back then, Dr. Rosenblum, who goes by Gia and is now 58, had just gone on a date with Mr. Miller’s friend. The friend was at Mr. Miller’s house in Prospect Park South, Brooklyn, and passed the phone around for friends to say hello.

When Mr. Miller got on the line, they said they talked for two hours, bonding over Monty Python and other shared interests.

She started dating his friend and joined their friend group, watching Marx Brothers movies and even sneaking along on his high school’s senior trip. After high school, they remained friends.

In 1987, they studied abroad in Europe — she in Copenhagen, he in London — and met up to travel to different European cities. By then, she and Mr. Miller’s friend had broken up, they said. Regardless, they felt that a relationship between them was off-limits. But there was “romantic tension,” they said. A year or two later, he wanted to date, but she didn’t feel the same way.